If a robot killed arbitrarily, it would be difficult to hold anyone accountable.
Whereas currently there is no indiscriminate killing with drones going on without any accountability whatsoever? What's the current body count for innocent civilians murdered by the US and its allies in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.? A few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands?
I doubt it would make much difference in practice...
I'm genuinely baffled why a) this has not already happened and b) that it's generating so many comments and so much negativity. My ten year old car (a Renault Mégane CC) has keyless entry and start. It's awesome; I just walk up to the car and grip the handle: it unlocks. I get in and press the start button: it starts. It's very convenient and works perfectly. It's much better in every respect than the old fashioned mechanical lock and switch. To lock the doors I just press a button on the handle. All of this obviously only works if I have the keycard on me. It's even clever enough not to let me lock the doors from the outside if the keycard is still inside the car.
It does have a backup system in case it ever should fail, which I agree should always exist. For unlocking the door the driver's side door actually has a mechanical lock hidden behind a cover in the handle which you can pop off with the emergency key, which is hidden inside in the keycard. And for starting the car you can insert the keycard in a slot in the dashboard. There's no old fashioned ignition switch.
I'm not familiar with the autonomous systems of the 777 but for a modern autopilot to enter a glide path as a last option as a failover would be a better idea other than to stall the aircraft and falling out of the sky.
I'm not so sure. I know that the Boeing design philosophy differs from the Airbus design philosophy in that it gives more autonomy to the pilots and has fewer automatic protections. In the case where there are no pilots that might backfire (although I guess ultimately it wouldn't make much difference). In addition I wouldn't expect that a modern autopilot has a reaction built in for a complete engine failure, since it's never supposed to happen.
My guess is that it would just try to maintain altitude, pitching up further and further as the plane slows down, possibly until it stalled and dropped like a brick, or possibly pitching down at some point to avoid stalling, which would still cause it to fly into the ocean at high speed and a steep angle. At some point the autopilot would probably disengage, since most autopilots are programmed to do so automatically when the plane's attitude becomes too erratic, after which there's no telling what the plane would do but it seems very unlikely that it would calmly glide towards the water (and hit it so evenly that it wouldn't break up).
I'm not convinced about the scientific integrity of this company. What they claim to be able to do sounds very vague, shady and too good to be true and there's a telling lack of concrete facts about how their technique works. The "learn more about GeoResonance technology" page is conveniently "under construction". The brief summary states they use:
Sounds a lot like pseudoscientific technobabble to me, absent more details. I'm getting a hint of Steorn here...
That is close to the northernmost one of the two arcs that Inmarsat deduced the last ping must have come from, so I guess it's not entirely implausible.
It doesn't seem likely to me that the plane would still be completely intact though, which seems to be implicit in this article. If it fell out of the sky due to lack of fuel, which currently seems the most likely scenario, it would have impacted the water at high speed and would surely have broken up.
The notion that because an individual is a member of a group which has been or is being disadvantaged compared to other groups, that individual deserves to be favoured above members of other groups, is ridiculous. It's dangerous, unfair and unjust nonsense. It's discrimination, pure and simple. There's no such thing as "positive discrimination".
Every individual deserves to have the same chance as everybody else, and should be judged on their merits alone.
Eventually it emerged that NSA had strengthened DES against secret cryptanalysis techniques that weren't generally known at the time. Many of the people that refused to use DES ended up using encryption schemes that were vulnerable to the secret techniques because they assumed the worst and were wrong.
An excellent illustration of the downfalls of security through obscurity. The NSA could have known that would happen and that their secrecy might decrease the average security situation due to people not using the actually more secure crypto. They should have been transparent about why they tweaked the S-box values. People shouldn't have to assume anything, best or worst.
And now of course the NSA have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted at all and nobody should ever accept magic numbers from them ever again...
The link also quite conveniently mentions the following tidbit: "OpenSSL was updated immediately in the DD-WRT SVN repository. It can take a view days until we can provide updated versions for all routers."
Yes, it actually says "a view days" instead of "a few days". A typo is one thing, but that is spectacular... Did they dictate it to their computer or something?
I don't understand why, in cases like this, so much attention is given to the question whether it's lawful or not.
Who cares?! Of course it's lawful, the governments of the world have made sure to have enough overly broad "war on terror", "won't somebody think of the children", "national security" laws on the books to make it possible to find a legal loophole justifying anything. Fuck the law.
Surely the question should be whether it's moral or not?
Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should.
